The Free Comic Book Day website has announced this year's giveaways. Included in the illustriously titled 'Gold Sponsor Offerings' are Simpsons and Futurama comics, the Transformers Animated FCBD 2008 Edition, All-Star Superman #1, Hellboy/B.P.R.D., Project Superpowers and a 2008 Shonen Jump sampler. Humbled by their 'Silver-level' status are Disney's Gyro Gearloose FCBD 2008 Edition and Gumby's Coloring Comic Book Special(?!). This year's Free Comic Book Day will be on May 3, 2008. You can visit the Free Comic Book Day website for the names of stores participating in your neck o' the woods.

DC Comics has paired six different anime directors (Satoshi Kon, among them) with six American comics writers (including Brian Azzarello and Greg Rucka) and told them to make six different Batman anime/animated shorts. Here is the trailer/making-of puff piece.

Friday, February 15, 2008

This past Valentine's Day, author/sex therapist Violet Blue gave a one hour lecture to the techs at Google, titled Abstinence Does Not Make The Heart Grow Fonder. In it, she tried to make sense of the governmentally funded, fifth annual 'Day of Purity.' Needless to say, she couldn't.

The Guardian UK's Gary Younge joins Graydon Carter (the editor of Vanity Fair and the author of What We Lost) and Christopher Hitchens (author of God is Not Great) in launching 'Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States' -- a consideration of the state of the union. The video of the event is split into seven parts. You'll want to start here.

Just in time for the day after Valentine's Day (my bad, I should've posted it earlier), Sexual Fables examines Why Jane Austen Never Married. I know that this is the sort of thing that fascinates those of you with Anglophile chick lit predilections, but think about it. If Austen had tied herself down with a 19th century marriage, do you really think that she would have written so many books? Y'all should be celebrating the fact that marriage missed Ms. Austen, not nit-picking the particulars as to why.(Thanks to Bookslut for the heads-up.)

Magician/comics scribe Grant Morrison sits down with Newsarama to discuss his plans for DC Comics' current Comic Book Event of the Year, Final Crisis. Normally these over-hyped crossovers have zero appeal to me, but this one sounds different. I mean, did 52 have Sonny Sumo, Anthro the Caveboy, "some seriously badass super-animals," and a guy called the Human Flame? ("He’s this really goofy character we found in an old Martian Manhunter story. He’s this dumb supervillain who just sits around with his cell phone taking pictures of all the other villains and driving them crazy. But he’s got a really big role to play. The name was just so great, 'the Human Flame,' in a story about evil coming to Earth…and snuffing out 'the Human Flame.'”) Answer: nope.

From TechNewsWorld.com:Borders, the second-largest book retailer in the U.S., on Wednesday, announced it is opening the first of 14 new concept stores that it will launch this year as part of a restructuring plan it revealed in 2007. Central to the new store format is a "Digital Center" that will enable customers to download books, burn CDs, self-publish their own books and research their family background.Wow! The future is now! It's like The Jetsons meet the Flintstones! It's...it's...wholly unnecessary. Who besides your tech-ignorant grandparents is going to want to drive all the way to their local Borders to do what they could just as easily have done from their own home?

And they say the Jews are stingy. "They" obviously didn't know about the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, valued at $100,000 and recently awarded to Lucette Lagnado for The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World. Truth be told, I'd never heard of it either. And I'm circumcised.

Lest you money-hungry Gentiles start downloading copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, keep in mind that y'all are still eligible for the Kingsley Tufts Award, a $100,000 prize given to a poet "who is past the very beginning but has not yet reached the acknowledged pinnacle of his or her career." This year's winner? Tom Sleigh and his book, Space Walk.

Ah, but all is not dollar signs and harmless racist jokes in the world of words. Remember those Mohammed cartoons that had the Muslim world in an uproar? Danish authorities just arrested three people who were allegedly planning to assassinate one of the offending cartoonists. A heck of a lot of good $100,000 does when your d-e-a-d.

Bonus News Item That I Had No Way Of Tying Into This Loosely Themed Thread:

The Archive of American Television has an exhaustive seven part interview with Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Woman) available here. It starts off slow (the interviewer's fault), and lags a bit from time to time, but it covers just about every aspect of Matheson's life -- from his childhood visits to the public library all the way up to his work on 2002's Hunted Past Reason .

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

New York Magazine has posted an entire short story by Jo Chen, titled 99 Roses. It starts off as a sort of over-the-top romance, then takes an unexpected turn, totally confounding your expectations. 99 Roses is just one of the many quirky tales in Chen's The Other Side of the Mirror, out now from Tokyopop.Click the here to begin.

Don't care for sequels? How about prequels? How about prequels written by authors that had nothing to do with the original book? Still with me? The CBC has an interview with Budge Wilson, author of Before Green Gables, the officially licensed prequel to Anne of Green Gables.

Remember yesterday's news item about the publishers becoming a bookstore's new competitor? We weren't lying. Via Reuters: "Random House Publishing Group, the world's largest book publisher, is planning to test selling individual chapters of a popular book to gauge reader demand."

Via The Baltimore Sun: "Barack Obama beat former President Bill Clinton for the Grammy Award this year for best spoken word. Obama won for the audio book version of his bestseller, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. It marked his second Grammy, following a win in 2006 for Dreams From My Father, an audiobook for a memoir first published in 1995."

Via The Telegraph UK: The good news: After 922 years of mystery, The Doomsday Book is on-line for all to read. The Bad News: The book is not an ancient tome of apocalyptic warnings, but an 1085 land survey commissioned by William the Conquerer, written primarily for tax purposes (the Old English 'dom' means reckoning or accounting). Borrring.

This was first announced back in 2006, but it's just started popping up in headlines across the globe again.Via The Star Online (Malaysia): "Spider-Man director Sam Raimi is adapting Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth books into a syndicated TV series. The series will be called Wizard’s First Rule, taking its title from the first book in the series. It has already been picked up by Tribune Broadcasting."And then, perhaps to sabotage any excitement you might be feeling, the article goes on to say:"Raimi was an executive producer on syndicated shows Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess."Ouch.

Via The Comics Reporter.com: "Valerie D'Orazio worked as an assistant editor at Acclaim and then DC Comics, leaving the latter position in a cloud of dissatisfaction that saw expression in a much talked-about series of on-line postings called Goodbye to Comics. That group of essays dissected in brutal, unsparing fashion comics culture as D'Orazio had experienced it thus far. She painted a portrait of an unhealthy if not outright damaging world of widespread obsessive behavior, behavioral dysfunction and unrealized expectations. This helped gain her a new and attentive audience that has since made her blog Occasional Superheroine one of the can't-miss stops for mainstream comics commentary on the Internet. She's recently announced plans to expand the site."The Comics Reporter has a brand new interview with D'Orazio, posted here.

A brick and mortar bookstore's main competition used be other brick and mortar bookstores. Then, about ten years ago, their arch rival became internet behemoth Amazon.com. Now, thanks to that same internet, their new foe for the reader's dough looks to be the publishers.Via The NYTimes: "In an attempt to increase book sales, HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its Web site. The idea is to give readers the opportunity to sample the books online in the same way that prospective buyers can flip through books in a bookstore. 'It’s like taking the shrink wrap off a book,' said Jane Friedman, chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide. 'The best way to sell books is to have the consumer be able to read some of that content.' For more than a year, visitors to HarperCollins’ Web site have been able to use the company’s Browse Inside function to look at some pages of most of the publisher’s current titles. Ms. Friedman said she believed that by displaying even more of the book’s content free, more readers would be enticed to buy."In related news, via Slashdot.org: "Tor Books is launching a new site and running a campaign in which they are giving away e-books (free as in beer) until the site goes live. To get in on the deal, fill out the form at their site, and each week you will receive a newsletter containing links to download a new book. The first two books are Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson followed by Old Man's War by John Scalzi."